There are nearly eight billion people on Earth. Most of them will never love you.

What does it mean when the television characters that move you are terrible people? After watching the most recent episode of Rick and Morty and rewatching both seasons of Bojack Horseman, I decided to ask myself why. And the answer is simple and kind of tragic: it is easily to feel emotionally connected to characters who hate themselves especially if your own self-esteem is paper-weighted by a lump of self-loathing and a half-bottle of cheap chardonnay. Don’t know what that feels like? I tried, badly, to do the math on it.

Throughout your life, you most likely had at least one parent, maybe two. But there was never any guarantee that they would or could love you, and it’s entirely possible (nay, probable), that they hated you for ruining their youth and blamed you for the end of their wild exploratory mid-years, even if they never told you. Your parents were cool once and you’re the reason they’re not anymore. If you had siblings, those might love you, but it’s entirely possible that they hate you, or a mix; so, at bare minimum, we’re still down to zero guaranteed blood relatives that will sob uncontrollably when you’re grisly murder is perpetrated. But for the sake of this exercise, let’s estimate high and assume that you had two parents and one sibling that loved you.

Grandparents are sometimes dead, and aunts and uncles might love you, but it’s also true that grandparents and creepy uncles love you but only enough to buy you tube socks and give you advice you never asked for, so the love you knew as a child might have really just been an obligation you tried to avoid by hiding in your room and watching Reading Rainbow. But for the sake of this exercise, let’s meet in the middle with the quantity of grandparents and say that two were alive, and two actually loved you more than the requisite amount for getting into heaven. I’ll throw you an aunt. The tally is at 6 people who probably loved you.

Levar Burton. He probably loved you. He probably still loves you. There you go. We have seven.

Then, there’s lovers. Everyone falls in love. You’ve probably been in love with someone who didn’t really love you. Maybe you were in a relationship with someone who didn’t really love you, either. Maybe you got lucky, and one person really truly loved who you were before you realized how stupid it was to have a good thing and wiped your ass with that relationship. So, we’re at 8.

Now, let’s do the math on that.

There are 7.3 billion people on the planet. That’s enough to guarantee you can walk down at least 90% of the streets in America without anybody loving you. You can shop at every Walmart in the United States and run into more furries dressed in full suits than people who will love you. McDonald’s serves around 6.4 million burgers a day to people who could care less if you lived or died. If you laid 7.3 billion people down head to foot, it might create a human bridge large enough to span the empty crevasse in your soul.

You are loved by 0.00000011% people. In science terms, that’s 1.10×10-7%, or what the rest of us mathematical plebeians call “really fucking tiny.”

Self-loathing settles in the bottom of an alcohol bottle like furry orange juice concentrate. It spirals down your gullet during the last fateful swig and pounds you in the skull until the next morning. When the sweet sweet numb takes over your body, you start to feel normal again. The loathing is there, present, often forefront, but it’s somehow manageable. For Rick, that means being absolutely narcissistically certain that you are the center of everyone’s universe, and often convincing others of the same. For Bojack Horseman, it’s a sabotaging loved ones so they stay in your personal hell, and taking advantage of younger insecure or damaged people who rely on your leadership.

“Sometimes when you’re an adult, the right thing isn’t always the best thing.”

Why do people make decisions that we know are awful selfish decisions? On the eleventh episode of Bojack’s second season, Bojack hit his new lowest low when, rejected by old flame Charlotte (a married deer-woman), he gives in to the urges of her teenage daughter, Penny. It’s not like Bojack loved Charlotte. She only represented a decision Bojack wished he made decades earlier when he was still finding his way in show business, a decision he only wishes he made in hindsight after decades of being a washed up alcoholic nobody. There are thousands of well-paid celebrities that desire little more than to move out to the country, and many of them resultantly have homes in various countrysides and on ranches as escapes. Bojack is not quite as successful.

As is typical for someone afflicted by drunken narcissism and paranoid self-loathing, Bojack assigns enormous meaning to happy events that others find insignificant, because he’s locked on to those as singular moments of satisfaction. The balloon lanterns are an example of this. Charlotte remembers that night positively but without much emotional attachment, whereas Bojack attempted to repeat the romance of that memory with Penny. It worked on her, probably because she’s seventeen. Although Bojack rejected her advances several times, he eventually succumbed to his own fantasy. Charlotte had rejected him, but Penny looked just like her, and her face and embrace could service his impossible dream. He was too foolish to understand that going through with it wouldn’t change the outcome of his life; inevitably, it would mean the end of one desire and the beginning of another, and another, and another.

Obviously, he was deservedly punished. He didn’t just successfully seduce the teen daughter of his host. He made a strong and pointed attempt to shirk his contracted duties and abandon the world he had chosen, and then he insulted the kindness of his host. He decided to live a fantasy instead of accepting his reality because fantasies hurt less and real change is hard. In S01E11, Bojack came face to face with the truth that he’s a terrible human/horse being. In S02E11 he proved it.

If Bojack is low, Rick and Morty’s Rick is licking the moss at rock bottom, especially in the second season’s third episode. Rick shows genuine distaste for every living thing that exists, including versions of himself in alternate dimensions. He seems like that dangerously entertaining combination of sociopath and super-genius, only his sociopathy is likely caused by his perpetual drunkenness. At several points throughout the series he demonstrates an unwillingness to protect or consider the needs and interests of Morty and Summer, and father Jerry already has him pegged as freeloader taking advantage of mother Beth’s abandonment issues caused by Rick’s extended absence during her youth. For any person abandoning a wife and child, including one burying their feelings with interplanetary drugs and booze, there is a deep well of soul-eating guilt that forms stalactites in the mind. They might be rock solid, but they’re there, impenetrable, unavoidable reminders of unforgivable selfishness, penetrating the tender grey matter.

Rick has a long and carefully cultivated personality of party lust, perpetual contempt, greed, and negligence that allows him to escape culpability with others while dulling the pain of the the prickly stalactites in himself. He occasionally has moments of what seems like genuine caring followed immediately by a rubber-band snap back to himself. For example, after the controlled explosion of a town, Rick nervously asks about the welfare of his grandkids, then immediately notes his empty drink. But for the most part, Rick remains opportunistic, especially when face-to-face with the recently assimilated culture that is his ex-girlfriend, Unity.

Like Unity notices, Rick sucks people into the whirlpool of his life. Unlike Unity, though, Rick can’t force the people he “unifies” to stay. Eventually, they get sick of his self-serving antics and abandon him. After spending an episode juxtaposing Summer and Morty’s misplaced empathy for the assimilated aliens with Rick’s never-ending stream of creepy kinks, they eventually abandon him; shortly after that, Unity does too, but because she realizes she can’t have any real sense of self while so heavily intoxicated and serviceable to Rick’s never-ending stream of sexually absurd whims. What happens next remains one of the most emotionally jarring moments the show has yet had. Rick, defeated after having been forced to face himself, resurrects and gently comforts a deformed blob before murdering it; he then turns the laser on himself. His suicide was a very near miss. It was Rick’s most candid and self-aware moment on the show this far. The show ended like most unbearably toxic relationships do: without satisfactory closure.

“Look alive, bright eyes, it’s the morning and somebody loves you!”

Can people change? Bojack’s rock bottom moment gave him enough sense to make try. In S02E12, Bojack finally opened his heart by admitting his appreciation for Todd and acknowledging the role Todd plays in his life. He also reveals that asking Todd to stay with him was one of the only times he made an intentional decision that made him feel good. Alcoholic depressives earn few of those. The season ends with Bojack accepting a new truth about self-improvement: “Every day it gets a little easier. But you gotta do it every day. That’s the hard part.” There’s hope for the horseman yet.

Only time will tell what will happen to Rick. In all likelihood, he’ll drink the pain away and forget his near-miss, until the next time he’s buried in the bowels of depression and ready to end, and again.

What will happen to you? It’s hard to say. You’re probably a terrible person, and unless you become an enormously wealthy philanthropist, the quantity of love you receive from the world will remain infinitesimally small. You’ll do what I do. Sit at home alone, face buried in your OKCupid app, waiting for something to change. Want a drink?

The day started strange enough.Since Dan Harmon’s odd “I’m going away for awhile” tweet, my timeline was awash in some kind of strange gloominess.I saw Community fans tweeting how glad they were that they became friends with other Community fans.They were thanking each other and themselves.I spotted one tweet “hoping they stay friends.”It had all of the hopeful but final aura of a high school graduation.Reality was going to set in.But, it felt oddly different than all of the other times I faced down the end of my favorite show.

I’m kind of glad for it really.Every season before ended with an ominous question mark.The fans were dutifully obsessed, twitterstorming and creatively campaigning so the show could live another day.We planned re-watches and retweeted enough Community spam to choke the NSA’s intake valves.We frequently flooded twitter with new trending hashtags unique to our little universe (#POPWHAT).But like any army in a mismatched war, we took heavy fire.We lost our leader, and then our network.We lost beloved characters and the writers who gave them life.The end of every season was some combination of worry or dissatisfaction.“It can’t end like this,” I remember saying year after year.“This can’t be how it goes.”

I don’t feel that way now.

Community was a conversation with us tonight.It took a long hard look into our wants and desires for the show and gently walked us through the portal between reality and fantasy.It showed us every potential future and asked us to really think about what would work and what wouldn’t.It gave us back a beloved character, if only for a taste.It gave some small satisfaction to one of the most deeply passionate sects of Community fandom.It revisited an extremely successful format by telling stories from the perspectives of each individual character (a la Season 3’s Seven Spooky Steps).It let Abed give us gentle reminders that television isn’t going to be what we want it to be, but it is still our oldest, dearest friend. Those are the friends that tell us the truth, even if that truth means sailing off into the ether with Levar Burton.

If the characters on Community feel like our friends, then we would naturally want them to succeed.That means wanting them to mature, take risks, and leave the nest.It means wanting what’s best for them and not for us.It means that sometimes characters outgrow their circumstances as they become fleshed and mature “people.”Who would Annie be if she failed at a career she was actually passionate about, and came back to Greendale in a slump?Who would WE be if we wished for Abed to fail at accomplishing some level of niche success in Los Angeles?Wouldn’t it be such a drag if this time, they really tried, with real opportunities, and they didn’t make it, and we re-piloted off of shallow failures all over again?

Who would we be if we forced a relationship to happen that, perhaps, shouldn’t happen?The show was right in asking us if a relationship with Jeff was what Annie really wanted.Ships are fantasies, often supported by forced aspects of a pre-designed ideal relationship.These fantasies make decent avenues for temporary personal satisfaction but aren’t necessarily good or even valid storytelling.They’re there because they satisfy something rooted deeper inside that wants to create order out of disordered and irrational emotions.We want them to love each other so that we can feel validated in loving them, even though we create scenarios that aren’t true to who these characters are.Even though Annie is now a young woman in her twenties, Jeff is in his forties, and that difference isn’t superficial.It’s generational.Annie is just starting her journey, and she can’t end on Jeff now, not with a lifetime of mistakes to make.I know we love Jeff/Annie.But do we love Jeff, and do we love Annie?

Fantasies feel good, as does the multi-camera family sitcom setup, complete with a TV-facing sofa and a “child area” that disappears backstage.But does that part of the fantasy feel better than the shipping itself?Don’t we love their relationship because they’re not together, so the tension stays alive?Aren’t the unresolved feelings and constant hope of satisfaction the real reason why people ship?

Aren’t we just in love with the idea of being loved?

I’m happy that the Jeff/Annie lovers were validated, in that these two characters really do love each other; their kiss was a gentle and delicate acknowledgment and not salivary and saccharine fanservice.But I tweeted it at least a year ago and I’ll tweet it again: the one thing I always wanted most for Annie is for her to have a mature adult relationship.And if I close my eyes now, she might.And if I close my eyes, Abed will have a cult following and screen his own Eraserhead, and Troy will be sailing with mermaids, and everything I want to happen will happen in my season seven.

By the time the third character said “Probably… maybe…” I realized that their dispirited response was more about coming back to Greendale than leaving it.And now, mine is too. I’m not sure I want season seven. I don’t think I do.

Right now, every character feels like they’re exactly where they should be.Community can finally go out on top, and with dignity.They won the war against the odds.Greendale doesn’t need saving anymore.Tonight, Community got the emotional and hilarious finale it truly deserved.As a fan, after all of these tumultuous years, that is all I really wanted.I’m ready to go back to reality now.

Notes:

In case you weren’t lulled gently back to reality by the show’s plot, the commercial was there to put it down sharply.“We were never actually born and we will never actually live.”

Is it just me, or was this the first time they finally took advantage of their right to drop F-Bombs?The Dean used it super-effectively, because it was so unexpected.

Chang farted on the fourth “cool.”I laughed so hard I farted.

That first hug was from Jeff to Abed.That second hug was from us to Abed.He has been a revelation to so many of us.I really cannot express how much Abed means to me, and how glad I am for that second hug.

Frankie’s vision of season seven so perfectly illustrated her character that my only real sadness about there not being another season is that we don’t get more of her.

Jeff in a room of Abeds to choke to illustrate Jeff’s shattered illusions: genius.

Thank you, to Yahoo Screen, for being super amazing and having all of this potential. I’m really really into Other Space.

Dan Harmon: I know you had to hide away, probably for the potential vitriol from restless and dissatisfied fans. I just hope they’re in the minority, and you’re really getting more outpourings of love and appreciation from saps like me.

I had to stop for a while. As much as I love this blog and love talking about television, the job that gives me the money to pay for this little blog is usurping most of my time. Teaching is time-consuming, exhausting, and soul-crushing, but also inspiring and liberating. I’m lucky to like what I do, I’m just not lucky enough to have time for the other things I want to do.

I’m still watching TV. Though I had to abandon some shows and relegate others to the sidelines, I still caught a solid bit of what’s been happening the last few months. If you read my twitter, you will know. Here are some brief thoughts on what I watched, and what you should be watching.

Broad City: This show did me in every week during its stellar second season. The comedy is equal parts buddy comedy and New York hipster satire, and I smell wafts of skunk every time I lay eyes on Ilana Glazer. It sets a new bar for drug humor, like Workaholics without all of the macho posturing that can get so tiresome. These are the kinds of stupid but amazing people that you still want to hang out and play video games with.

Bonus thought: Man, I miss when St. Mark’s was cool.

Orphan Black: Season 3 just started and I’m watching. I recently got my mother addicted to it. Every episode she’d look at me with wide eyes and some sense of horror, asking me questions about the show’s twists and turns while I gleefully sat silent. I even got her to call me a bitch for not spoiling the show. She’s watching 201 as I type this, and my desire for 302 made me have Helena dreams last night.

Bonus thought: A friend of mine just told me that Orphan Black, while not a great show on its own, is very important to women into genre fandom. The truth is, I think that Orphan Black is important to science fiction as a genre, because it has suffered a lack of three-dimensional female characters (particularly leads) for far too long, and Orphan Black proves female characters can work, and well, and without Joss Whedon.

Louie: He’s wearing his hipster glasses again. Last night, he toyed with my emotions by inviting Michael Rapaport to play the cop archetype we all despite so dreadfully. He was abusive, demeaning, and irresponsible, exactly the kind that we’re so sick of hearing about on the news. And in true Louie fashion, he manages to make us feel sympathy for this man’s rock-bottom moment while making us feel like total shits for not understanding why he’s such an insufferable shit.

Bonus thought: The premiere featured Morgan O’Kane, a banjoist who I had the pleasure of watching while waiting for the subway in Williamsburg. He’s really good, and very easy on the eyes.

Other Space: Yahoo Screen brought Community fans to their little internet hideaway and bestowed upon us a delicious treat. Other Space is a weird sendup of space shows, starring an underprepared and frankly foolish crew. It’s made me chuckle out loud in fart-causing ways, and has just enough heart to not be a total throwaway. Watch for Michael, He’s easily the crew member that gets picked on the most, and that makes him kind of adorkable.

Bonus thought: Give it two episodes. I didn’t get it at first. It’s intentionally cheesy and calls upon a 70s sensibility despite the fact that most of us were born far past the 80s.

Bonus Bonus: YES, watch Community. ESPECIALLY for Frankie playing steel drums. I will give my time to Season 6 when I have it, because it deserves it.

Better Call Saul: This is a cinematically stunning character study. We know who Saul Goodman is, but the journey to get from Jimmy McGill to the dirtiest lawyer in New Mexico is long and weird. Saul’s battle is an internal one, facing foes like time, patience, conscience, and a weakening finger grip on his desire to live a life above-board. On the outside, he’s up against bureaucratic foes, underworld rats, and an invisible hand whose emotionally charged reveal left me feeling betrayed. Oh, and you get to see him as a bottom-feeder con-man. That’s worth the time investment alone.

Bonus thought: Some people feel like Mike Ehrmantraut’s background story undermines the character as it existed on Breaking Bad, which I can see. But for those of us who watched that Shakespearian tragedy of a show, seeing Mike in his vanilla life is actually pretty funny. Watching him do a job while bathed in blue light is utterly riveting. And watching him emotionally unravel with his daughter-in-law brought me to tears. Sure, anyone watching Saul without Bad might not feel that emotional investment, but for us millions, it’s one of many things we’ve been waiting for.

My plan when summer vacation hits is to get back on the keyboard as much as possible. I’m planning on writing a book (which has been in progress, but also halted once school became too much to handle), as well as regular updates to this blog. I’m planning a new column about wine, and I’m investing in the construction of an iron flyswatter so I can torture Whovian Gwenhwyfar into writing more words for me. Additionally, I’m anticipating the beginning of Untitled.TV, a new tv blog that will knock your socks off when I throw my finger vomit up there.

I have to go back to my regularly scheduled life. Please enjoy the David Hasselhoff video up top. It’s half dork adventure and half toxic masculinity, with a mullet haircut and keytarist that looks like Weird Al Yankovic. I think we’ve officially hit the top limit of how much nostalgia we’re allowed to revere, and I’m ready to say “thanks for constantly revisiting the memories, guys, but it’s time to look at the future again.”

Thanks to any of you reading. See you soon, I hope. Don’t forget to follow me on twitter if you want to know what’s coming across my screen.

Parks was almost a wreck when it started.I downloaded the 6-episode first season after seeing Communie after Communie tweet about it.It sat there untouched until Superstorm Sandy blew through my power lines and left me with five nights of uninterrupted boredom.I was smart in advance and charged my laptop to full, and for the five dark nights I was without power, I sat huddled in my bedroom, wrapped in layers of old wool garments, watching.It was the Hanukkah of laptop battery lives, considering these days the old beast can’t spare more than 45 minutes without needing to feed.Leslie kept me company on five dark cold nights.

Even though I had some issues with her character, something behind her cold stupid eyes made me keep watching. When the show started, Leslie was some kind of ditz, and the show seemed to revel in taking shots at her.Her unyielding optimism for government wasn’t as heroic as it was blind folly, and much of the show’s humor centered around Leslie the Punching Bag.Still, I liked the premise enough to give the show another shot, and boy was it worth it.Leslie blossomed into an ambitious leader.She didn’t earn the validation of her peers; it was her validation of them that became infectious.We started to see reason in her optimism.We started to see heroism in her actions.We realized that we were already cynical enough about government and society, and what we needed from television was an example of the kind of character that might make us want to believe in the system again.Leslie was it.

Leslie’s always been insecure but unstoppable.She’d manically sugar-rush through every nerve-wrecking step, only to be re-centered by Ann, and later Ben.Her will never wavered even if her voice did.For the past few years, if Leslie Knope were running for office in a blue state, she’d be a sure thing.I can’t count the number of times I thought to myself “man, I really wish Leslie were real.”There are parts of her unshakeable nature that I’ve adopted… more than a few times, in weak moments moving through my professional career, I have asked myself what Leslie would do.And the decision has always been a good one.

All of the Pawnee characters meant a lot.They were an ensemble, and they worked off each other in interesting and entertaining ways.But Leslie is the one that inspired me.I will miss her mos.

The first time I heard these men play, they blew my ears out as I sat in on a raucous rehearsal to see how the sausage gets made. Even though they were just building up the first few songs they had created, something in the room felt bigger than all of us. Nox Cult is an in-your-face musical explosion, with all the rage of young punks and all the skills of old pros. Nox Cult is creating a monster bigger than itself. Right before Christmas, Soda invited me over to chat the band up and see what’s making this time bomb tick.

Nox Cult is the project of three musicians who have been playing around various local circuits for years. After the collapse of Soda’s last project, (e)motion Picture, the three met up in a quiet studio to make some sound waves angry. “We played a show together, like a year and a half ago, summertime… that band after us was Monkey’s band [Rico and the Rebels],” Soda, guitarist and vocalist, tells. After an energetic show surrounded by an audience of oddballs, Monkey made the suggestion that Soda should call him if he ever needed a drummer. “And he planted that little seed, and I never forgot that.” After (e)P collapsed, Soda took time out to collect himself, put out retrospective project Rarity Clarity, and gave Monkey a buzz. After hanging out, the two decided to make plans to get in the studio. What happened next was unexpectedly magical.

“The day we were supposed to do that, he said ‘I did something, I went behind your back and I invited a bass player.’ And I was like ‘I’m not ready for that.'” Soda, during this period, was sullen. (e)P was his most audacious and emotionally exhausting in years, and it collapsed because of irresponsibility. It carried a ghost of what should have been, which drove Soda into a period of reflection. Meeting with Monkey had been hist first toe in the pool for a while. But fortunately, Fox became integral to the band’s chemistry. “So we met up that night, Fox was there, and he just looked like the type of cat that I wanted to know… and we got in a room and wrote Friends and Snakes, and it’s just crazy because… I don’t know them, and it just happened.” What resulted was an instant spark, the kind so preciously delicate that they kept it a secret for months. Ever since they went public, it’s as if people have sensed their impending explosion. “I have people emailing me every day for gigs, gig gig gig gig. It’s a lot.”

Nox Cult intends on injecting energy back into the rock scene in a massive way. In an age where bands are making most of their money playing shows, so many fail to prepare to perform for living eyes. Nox Cult is a reminder that seeing a concert is like sex, and the best sex is full of unrestrained passion and aggression. “I often wonder how I walk off the stage,” says Soda. “Because there, I’m completely careless. I have no respect for my body or anything at that point.” Soda has been writing and performing music on Long Island for nearly twenty years. Over the course of his journey he’s released several albums and EPs to small but impassioned audiences in venues all over the tri-state area. After a period of solemn depth with previous band, (e)motion Picture, Soda’s let go of the reins of his emotions with music that sounds more liberated, or perhaps, unchained. “I’ve always been the very very sharp reminder that there is still soul in this world. That might be why I’m still virtually unknown,” Soda says, with a heaviness in his voice. “But anybody that sees me do what I do will remember me, that’s for sure. I’ll make sure you fucking remember me, whether you like me or not, you’ll remember me.”

“I’ll make sure you fucking remember me, whether you like me or not, you’ll remember me.”

Monkey mets the rage. “I want to see a drummer who can actually physically move all over his little stage, and pick up his arms and fight the kit as if he’s in battle with that drum set,” he says, lamenting. “I’ve seen guys play really heavy bands… they don’t move around the kit with skill, they move around with a lot of technique. And that’s boring to me.” And it is. As someone who spends a lot of time seeing live music, there is nothing more boring than a band who can’t put on a show. Nobody wants to see a band playing behind a curtain. “Live on stage, I’m going to show you aggression because it is visually stunning,” Monkey promises. And Monkey is to be believed. You’ll know when you hear it. The Nox Cult songs I’ve been privy to are high-energy and fast paced, infused with bizarre lyrics and a healthy dose of testosterone, and even rehearsing they struggle to restrain themselves in confinement. This is a band that wants motion.

Fox, bassist, gives an aura of quiet confidence. There’s a zen about him, like he carries a world of wisdom despite being the youngest member. But that isn’t his vision of himself. “I see myself as this angry person but so many people say I’m very low key, but there’s something about that adrenaline that gets me going, and like, I’m ready to like… and they’ve seen it, I get pissed.” Fox comes from New Jersey, and though the band hasn’t seen him perform yet, his debut is highly anticipated. “…Just by watching his head go in circles at rehearsals that’s enough for me to be really psyched to see this kid live on stage,” Monkey says, expectantly.

They firmly refuse to limit their offerings to one school of art. In a music scene full of an abundance of meaningless genres fractured by hyphenation, Nox Cult is defiant. One thing’s for sure: they are indefinable. “We’re just too experimental.” Soda says. Their originality is notable because they don’t especially sound like they fit into one of the cookie-cutter molds deigned by the industry. “I never hear another guitar player when Soda plays a riff. I never hear another vocalist when he starts singing. I don’t hear another bass player when Fox starts playing. That’s essentially how original this band feels to me,” Monkey says. Instead the band offers up adjectives, like “dark,” “aggressive,” “emotional,” “heavy,” and the most intriguing of all, “romantic.”

“It’s romantic as fuck,” Monkey says emphatically. And that can mean a lot of things; I sometimes wonder if he meant romantic or Romantic. But either could be applicable considering their content, ranging from animal cruelty to serial murder, and anything and everything in between. It’s just another way that they defy genre. And in a world that thrives on lables and boxes, it’s a foot in the grave. But they remain nonplussed. “Genres are an excuse for a record label to sell you something,” Monkey says.

Soda’s just as compellingly snide. “Like when you’re a little kid you have to eat what your parents put on your plate right? …I guess we’re like a rotten piece of fucking meat then, man, because what the fuck are you gonna say? It goes back to, like it or you don’t. You’re gonna remember that rotten piece of fucking meat, man.”

Nox Cult is playing a highly anticipated show January 25th at Blackthorn 51 in Elmhurst, NY, supporting Wednesday 13. I’ll be there. If you’ve got sense, you will be to. Contact the band for tickets, at noxcult.com. Read the chemistry below, and then check out Soda’s blog, the Music Survival Guide.

“You’re gonna remember that rotten piece of fucking meat, man”

ILWS: What’s your journey?

Fox: My buddy bought a guitar when we were twelve, so I went and got a bass, and we played around for like a week, and he went and took lessons and I didn’t. And uh, I dunno, I just had it laying around, and eventually I just started picking it up, and some people picked me up, and taught me their songs, and I was in their band, and then I stopped. And like there was lot of drug use in my life, it got in the way, and I moved here two years ago.

ILWS: Where are you from?

Fox: New Jersey, outside Atlantic City. And, I dunno how it happened, I was just looking for someone to play with, and I met up with one buddy and felt like I outgrew him, and I met Monkey and Soda and that was kind of it, really.

ILWS: How did you guys (Soda and Monkey) meet? How did you find each other? What serendipitous event?

Soda: (e)motion Picture played… Terry (Soda’s drummer from (e)P) and Monkey know each other. I don’t even like to talk about him. We played a show together, like a year and a half ago, summertime. You were there. (I was.) That band after us was Monkey’s band (Rico and the Rebels). So after we played, that happened to be a particularly good (e)P show, he came up and said “if you ever get rid of Terry you gotta call me,” and he like planted that little seed and I never forgot that, I never forgot that after I watched him play I was like “alright, whatever.”

Monkey: I hired the team of Inception.

Soda: A week or two after I walked totally out of Terry’s life completely and I stopped doing (e)motion Picture, like I quit that cold turkey. I don’t even know how, I had his phone number, but I texted him like “Hey Monkey, it’s Soda, I don’t play with Terry anymore, remember that time you told me to call you? That’s what I’m doing.” He’s like “no shit,” and two weeks later we got together, hung out, drove around town, checked out the studio and he showed me his toys and we shared some of each others music, past songs and stuff, and that was that. And in a week or two, “lets get together and make some noise, see how it goes.” The day we were supposed to do that he said “I did something, I went behind your back and I invited a bass player.” And I was like “I’m not ready for that,” I just wasn’t ready, period, because (e)P took a toll on me in a whole bunch of different ways. I was in between music making bands again, I was doing solo shows, and that’s when I took the downtime to do Rarity Clarity.

So we met up that night, Fox was there, and he just looked like the type of cat that I wanted to know, know what I mean? That sounds almost superficial, but I saw him like “that cat’s cool, I wanna chat him up.” And we got in a room and wrote Friends and Snakes, and it’s just crazy, because I got into a room with them and I don’t know them, and it just happened. And then we got to know each other more and we have an interesting relationship, I think it’s almost like a brotherly relationship… because we get on each others’ nerves in that fashion. When he gets on my nerves, it makes me want to gouge his eyes out but it’s almost, like, different.

At this point, Monkey invited us upstairs, where we relaxed on benches in a room padded with sound dampening foam, a few random pieces of drum gear, and a computer with a rather lovely bluish background. In the distance was Monkey’s daughter’s playroom, a place I could only describe as being an eerie Disney nightmare in the dark.

Soda: So yeah, our own dynamic is good, because like I said, I feel like it’s almost like a brotherly thing. I can definitely tell you that we get on Fox like he’s our little brother. 110%. We just decided to roll with it and six months later we’ve got about eight songs that are really great, really difficult, they give me a workout for sure.

ILWS: I’ve heard it. It sounds like a workout. So are you guys planning on any releases in the near future?

Soda: ASAP. We want to move along as fast as possible, and then we start talking about money, and then we don’t want to talk about money, and that’s when that conversation stops. Everything involves money.

Monkey: The way things started, it started so organically, from the ground up, that the moment we try to push something, even the littlest thing, dark clouds form, lighting, and we’re like whoa whoa.

Soda: The second that we officially gave word to the world, I didn’t tell a lot of people about it (at first)…

ILWS: The inner circle.

Soda: You know, playing and I don’t know what’s going to happen, whatever, but the second we started our internet presence, everything started, I have people emailing me every day for gigs, gig gig gig gig. It’s a lot. Once January comes and we start playing, we’re gonna continue to play as much as we can, I think we’re talking 2-3 times a month if that’s possible. New York, NJ, surrounding areas.

Monkey: There’s almost a playbook when you’re first starting out. Certain things that you want to accomplish. First you want to write songs, then you want to perfect them, then you want to book gigs, after that people have their own idea, but essentially at some point you have to record a demo…

Soda: We’re gonna record a demo as soon as we can because Monkey has the abilities to do it and he just has that brain to do that music with.

Monkey: I don’t want to waste resources going somewhere no matter how good it can sound, I’ve been down that road before, it’s a waste of money, stressful.

Soda: Demos are demos for a reason, they don’t need to be these polished pieces of work, because then forget it, make a record.

Monkey: They have to be played perfectly, they don’t have to be recorded perfectly. You don’t want to show mistakes on the demos.

Soda: And demo soon because people are asking, people been asking since we went live.

ILWS: What about download cards?

Soda: With (e)P we cut our single and I wanted to put it out on a vinyl, I wanted to do a colored vinyl limited edition, but I was put in a position where I had to fund everything, like 75% of that, couldn’t do it. So I did the download card, and I’m like “this is a great idea, because a lot of people just don’t buy music anymore. We’ll sell them at shows for a buck.” For every ten download cards I give, seriously lucky if one person downloads the thing. I find that people still want tangible music. Absolutely vinyl because vinyl is cool now, it’s hip.

ILWS: Vinyl had its biggest year since the 70s this year.

Soda: It’s crazy and then you know, you get a vinyl, you can put a download card in with the vinyl, whether or not people want to do it at that point is up to them, but just doing the download card I honestly think it was a bit of a waste. If I gave out CDs of that single, it would have been listened to more. I still give out a lot of cards because I have a stack of them, and it bums me out because that single is just so good. Like, the full version with the B-Side and a radio edit, the quality, the performance, that had the makings of a hit.

ILWS: How have you guys responded to Soda’s history of music? What’s it like listening to each other? Do you hear influences?

Monkey: I have a hard time picking up influences because they listen to a lot of stuff that I probably never heard of. I consider myself to be very ignorant when it comes to bands who are out there today who have been out there a long time, local bands that have blown up but stayed local. You ask me about a band, I’d probably have to go back to the early 90s to give you any kind of details. And I kind of pride myself on this, I don’t consider it to be a negative, or a flaw, because it kind of helps me to really try to create the most original sounds possible. With that being said, you could probably get a lot of my influences from the early 90s, that I think of Fox in the early 90s, he was quite young, and yet he listens to Ugly Kid Joe.

Soda: That’s one of his favorite bands actually.

Monkey: And he listened to stuff from the 80s.

Fox: Whitesnake.

Monkey: Yeah, you know, uh, I never hear another guitar player when Soda plays a riff. I never hear another vocalist when he starts singing. I don’t hear another bass player when Fox starts playing. That’s essentially how original this band feels to me. Whatever they say about me, you could pinpoint it from the early 90s, and I’ve been playing since then, so there’s got to be a lot of originality there.

Soda: I have had the luxury of playing with really really good drummers. They’re all definitely a whole different breed of human. Each time that I come out of a project after putting so much time and effort into them, I’m like “man, never again, there’s no way.” The fact that this came together the way it did like totally shocked me, and that’s why I kept my lips sealed about it, thinking “this is too good to be true,” you know what I mean, and each time I feel like I wind up getting another fucking drummer that winds up topping the last one. The last one was good, but you know, I don’t fucking care. I don’t talk shit like that, but you can, go crazy. But he (Monkey) brings to the table the ability to play drums the way he plays drums, the knowledge of all this shit (pointing to Monkey’s sound editing setup) that I’m not good at, we all have like these tidbits of shit that we put into this whatever, and it’s just like an explosion of everything. You know, I tell them, this is the last time I’m doing this, and I don’t think they believe me. Fucking, again, put it on record, I’m done.

ILWS: So getting into this energy now that you’re giving me… where does the rage come from?

Monkey: Marriage. Traffic. People, Bills. Pol-i-tics…?

(Assorted laughs while Monkey talks, Soda agrees with traffic)

Monkey: Ignorant people.

ILWS: Do you feel like the monster comes out, almost as like, a necessity? Is this a survival mechanism?

Monkey: If I didn’t have the opportunity to play the drums the way I do, or as frequently as I do, I would be a much more difficult person to deal with on a regular basis. It’s uh, it’s an outlet. I don’t do exercise, I don’t play sports, I don’t beat my wife, so I beat the shit out of my drums with the heaviest sticks I can find, and it feels good, it releases endorphins on a chemical level so that’s the addiction, but other than that, it’s just banging on stuff. It feels good.

Fox: You even put weights on that one night.

Monkey: I put weights on my wrists, but I couldn’t do that, I couldn’t move my wrists.

Soda: That’s a serious workout.

ILWS: Fox, what about you?

Fox: Honestly, I spent most of my life just hating people, just being angry, and I feel like at some point I burnt myself out. I see myself as this angry person but so many people say I’m very low key, but there’s something about that adrenaline that gets me going, and like, I’m ready to like, and they’ve seen it, I get pissed.

Monkey: If the three of us got into a fight, he’d win.

Fox: Don’t say that.

Monkey: Fox would win, I’m serious. You do not stop. You’d be just relentless, battle royale. I’d probably giggle myself to death, and you’d get a good punch in, and I’d just be done.

Fox: I don’t really like the rage anymore. I feel like of all my background in music, I probably should have been in like a death metal band or something, but it’s just too, I dunno, I just don’t feel that way.

Monkey: Strumming a bass or strumming a guitar does not compare physically to playing the drums. So, you kind of have to watch a person on stage and see what they do with themselves. See if they’re just kind of standing around out there. And that’s honestly something that we still have to see. I’ve seen Soda live on stage twice in bar situations where you think you only have so much room to do stuff and yet he’s walking on the bar. To me that was just like genius. He’s seen me enough to say that he enjoys watching me play and he sees I get carried away. We have yet to see Fox get on stage and have that adrenaline really kick in, but just by watching his head go in circles at rehearsals that’s enough for me to be really psyched to see this kid live on stage.

ILWS: (Soda) Where does the rage come from?

Soda: For some reason, I’ve always been kind of… I had these weird feelings that… I can’t necessarily pinpoint where I get this anger from, or this depression or whatever. Because I don’t want it. It’s not a tool that I use to make myself seem more interesting. The last thing I want to do is sit around and be in like a dark hole. I’ve been that way forever. I always manage to pull myself out of it, there’s really no reason for it. I had my family upbringing was good, my mother was great. I had issues, I don’t speak to my father, it’s been years now. But it’s like I dunno if I just went on with my life so long without actually going to seek some assistance with these feelings? But, I utilize how I feel all the time to make music. It is like, the best medicine that’s manage to keep me, It’s managed to keep me on some kind of steady path in my life. I’ve been a straightedge my whole life. I love being a straightedge.

The songs that we’ve been writing, they’re heavier than music I’ve written in a long time. The lyrical content is different too. Because I feel like we’re coming from a different place like (E)P was soul bearing stuff, those lyrics went to places I didn’t think I was going to be able to go to anymore. With this though, these songs, we got songs about serial killers, about backstabbing, about animal abuse, not to say that I’ve never written anything about that kind of stuff, but I dunno.. when people say “what kind of music is it?” I don’t want to call it metal, because if we called ourselves metal like in a metal community they’d hate us right away because we don’t look like a metal band. We don’t play like a metal band either. We’re just too experimental. You know?

Monkey: I want to clarify on my end just a little bit, because your question was very specific to an emotion, which was rage. If I’m playing heavy, I’m showing aggression, but it’s not because I’m mad, it’s because it grabs attention. I’ve seen guys play really heavy bands, see drummers in really heavy bands, who are totally still, and they play with thin and small and light sticks, they don’t move around the kit with skill, they move around with a lot of technique. And that’s boring to me. I want to see elbows in the air. I don’t want to see a guy with his eyes closed showing how good he is with as little movement as possible. I want to see a drummer who can actually physically move all over his little stage, and pick up his arms and fight the kit as if he’s in battle with that drum set. Live on stage, I’m going to show you aggression because it is visually stunning. It doesn’t mean that I’m an angry person. I’m just trying to put on a show… Soda puts his foot on my bass drum. I want to kick that bass drum a little harder, because I want him to feel that hit go through his leg.

Soda: Nothing makes me crazier than a crazy drummer too, though. That only adds to my insanity. And I’ve… I often wonder how I walk off the stage. Because there, I’m completely careless. I have no respect for my body or anything at that point. Like, I mean, there are times when I do actually scare myself when I’m up there because I have no self regard for anything. I’ve blacked out, I’ve done just about everything on a stage that I could possibly do. I don’t want to say that to seem pretentious or whatever. But from the time that I’ve first gotten on stage or whatever, it just, was like, a thing. It was a huge part of my life, you know? And I managed to figure out ways to project at lot of these feelings through music. It’s like people go to therapy. I’ve got a half hour on stage to really go see my doctor and get it all out. It’s definitely scary sometimes.

Some people do it for money, music, you know, there’s lots of money to be made in the entertainment industry. That’s why a lot of it’s completely soulless now, too. I’ve always been the very very sharp reminder that there is still soul in this world. That might be why I’m still like virtually unknown. But anybody that sees me do what I do will remember me, that’s for sure. I’ll make sure you fucking remember me, whether you like me or not, you’ll remember me.

ILWS: We’re all coming from different weird places, so, and we talked about before how you don’t want to be called a metal band because you know metal fans won’t be into it because you don’t fit the aesthetic and the style…

Monkey: Metal is a genre that began in the 80s essentially, that belongs in the 80s. That’s the only reason..

Soda: People still refer to all these new bands as metal that are doing that or whatever. I don’t mind being referred to metal, us personally, I don’t think I would say…

Monkey: There are bands today, there are bands from the past 15-20 years, that sound like classic rock. Yet, they would never say that their genre is classic rock, because classic rock is definitely a late 60s, 70s kind of thing. Metal is the same. Metal is an 80s genre that belongs in the 80s, because after metal… you get glam metal, and the grunge thing, and you get… kind of like the rock funk Chili Pepper thing, and… I have my opinions as far as genres go. I don’t want to get into that right now, but for a band today to say that they’re a metal band, if they’re not screaming falsettos and playing like really aggressive Bach Beethoven stuff on electric guitars, then it’s not what metal sounds like to me, personally. It might be hardcore, it might be hard rock, it might be thrash, it might be death… dark… whatever, all these things. Genres, personally, are not the right way to describe anybody.

Soda: But it has to be, because the general public, if you don’t fucking tell them, then they’re just not… I mean, they don’t understand anyway. But it’s being force fed to everybody.

Monkey: I think you could use other adjectives to describe a band, especially…

Soda: I just say fucking alternative, because I think that encapsules a lot and I think that’s… me personally, to some of my life, is fucking alternative. Period.

Monkey: And just to play devil’s advocate, I would say well you know what, REM is alternative.

Soda: …absolutely, 110%, I would think that back then, like 80s, early 80s especially, when college rock was real college rock, I would definitely put REM into that genre, I would even consider them indie rock a bit, but right now, I would say REM absolutely would be considered an alternative music act.

ILWS: Well one of the things that I notice about genres is that there is no pure genre, everything has a hyphen now, everything has a hyphenated last name. There’s thrash metal, there’s hardcore, punkcore, there’s dance punk, a lot of cores, a lot of metals, and it just… coming back to something like REM, it is alternative, but it is also indie and it is also college rock and now, you know, there’s so many adjectives that I wonder if they end up being limiting. So I wanted to give you guys the opportunity to create an aesthetic for yourself, without having, without necessarily needing to define yourself to any genre. So how would you do that without using genre words?

Fox: Dark, heavy, assaulting, and aggressive.

Monkey: Dark, aggressive, heavy, emotional.

Soda: Yeah, absolutely those adjectives are right on the money. I think, um…

Monkey: It’s romantic as fuck. Like, it could definitely be romantic, if you understood what Soda was talking about, where he’s coming from and why that certain piece decided to go down on paper… you take away the lyrics to any music and you can kind of pinpoint certain genres, if you put the lyrics on paper and you don’t disclose the music, then it’s just poetry. And then you have to describe what kind of poetry is it? Is it mid 20th century? Mid 19th century? Shakespearian, sonnet, haiku? But it’s all very personal, it’s all very deep, it could be about love about hate about war about birth… now put all of these things together and you just have a soup of these things that had to happen in order to create a song from beginning to end. So yeah, an aggressive as shit song, that’s really heavy, with lots of distortion, lots of you know, just intrigue, that’s about an elephant. It kind of raises the question “what the fuck is this?” …Genres are an excuse for a record label to sell you something.

Soda: The music world, I won’t even say industry, is just so disgusting, and filled with soulless garbage that like, it’s so easy to take that in. Like when you’re a little kid you have to eat what your parents put on your plate right? That’s just the way the entertainment industry is. You know? And so, I guess we’re like a rotten piece of fucking meat then, man, because what the fuck are you gonna say? It goes back to, like it or you don’t. You’re gonna remember that rotten piece of fucking meat, man.

Leaving things unfinished is somewhat of a family tradition–at least on my Dad’s side of the family. Definitely not on my mother’s side-or at least not on Kat–our beloved blogmistress’ side of the family. She and her siblings all managed to finish college, get proper jobs, and live in homes that didn’t have some form of sheetrock dangling in the background.

Our side? Not so much. Family legend holds that our Nana believed were my father to finish any one room in our then-constantly being renovated home she’d drop dead on the spot. He’d tear down the walls in one room, put up the sheetrock, get an idea for another room, start there, and suddenly our house was an array of jigsaw pieces of sheetrock, paneling and joint compound to varying degrees that drove my mother to madness. His having to work didn’t help, nor did the fact that the local bar was conveniently on the way to the hardware store. What should have been a five-minute drive for supplies usually turned into a three-hour expedition, two and a half of those hours spent sat upon his barstool at said local. When I was nineteen going on twenty he shuffled off to that hardware store in the sky and my mother took some of the dividends of his early departure and finished what he started. We left off the grate on one heat register in the hopes of maintaining Nana’s immortality–which sadly didn’t work, she popped off a few years later.

I’m trying, dammit!

This, this, my dears, is one of the reasons I’m convinced I’m so utterly fucked whenever it comes to writing for Kat’s blog. One of many, mind you. My writing (or lack thereof) has always been a bit fucked up and disjointed. I had always put it to the reasons above and the fucking epilepsy. It turns out I was sort of right on both accounts. I used to be smart. I used to be clever. However years of drugs (prescribed, thanks so much) and seizures which they’ve failed to stop have apparently fucked this bitch up. The new dipshit epileptologist had me tested and told me that I’ve got slowed processing speed now. Which, frankly, I didn’t need a test to figure out–my wunderkind math skills give that shit away on the spot. He also said that I now have Adult Attention Deficit Disorder because of the fits and the drugs. A fact which I adamantly refuse to believe.

You however, may rightly see his point, because this post wasn’t supposed to be about any of this shit. It was supposed to be and will eventually be about Craig Ferguson’s last show (yea, it was last week, sue me. I don’t follow anyone’s rules, either). Every time I start to type though, there is a qualifier or a saga or a fucking epic side note. I’ve yet to finish my piece on why Rik Mayall’s death hit me like a ton of bricks. Nor my Hoopy Frood Craigy Birthday trip to LA. That was October, people. Here I am posting about the last show before I even talk about my trip. What I’m saying is, whenever I start to type is, it’s a long story.

A very long story if I tell it.

I have always been a late nite devotee–I started years back as a teen watching Johnny Carson and David Letterman–because insomnia goes hand in hand with the time slot. It admittedly goes a bit haywire after 1:37 if you don’t have cable, but noise is noise. Reruns and infomercials are shite but I basked in the glory of 12:37 to 1:37 because it really wasn’t like any other late night show. I thought I’d be so gutted–and I kind of was–but who wants to see someone, anyone, not doing something they’re not having fun with anymore? I loved Craig and Josh (I started watching in 2010) and honestly they’ve ruined late night for me, because everyone else is so by the books it’s ridiculous. Luckily I’ve got tons of Late Late Shows I can catch up with that the Latvians have creatively placed upon the interwebs on the CBS website.

I’m not going to talk about the opening first because I never do anything right, as you can plainly see. So we’ll head right to the monologue where they zipped by ten years of him popping out. Also, appearing on the stage (Sorry, his fault, I couldn’t resist. Also, this is genetic in our family, just ask Kat). Maybe it’s just me and my aged 42 year old inner accent slut, but I think he’s looking good now (a sentiment I know fellow skellies share) but his dejected sigh and warning to never do that to yourself amused me no end, regardless. I don’t think art was a grand term at all. It really was art, not that I know the first thing about art. I know from late night and I know from funny, though. I’ve never seen anything like his show before and I doubt the suits* will ever let it happen again, because suits are morons–such as the suits worship of the beloved demographics etc.

*By suits I mean network execs, obviously

(Case in point, everyone complaining about the successor. It’s not the kid’s fault. It’s all the suits who seem to think the only people who watch TV at 12:30 are male white 18-34 year olds eating pizza after getting the munchies. Suits are dipshits. Or maybe they’re right and I’ve got the mentality of my kid brother in spite of being seven years older and a chick. Suits are still dipshits, though)

-getting wangy with it.

The faux-argument between Craig and Geoff was brilliant and the bidding adieu CNN bits have always made me giggle so I was quite pleased to see that. The only thing that disappointed me on a deeply personal level was when they got to tweets and emails and I was hoping for one last call from Miriam. I so loved that wretched old cow–I have no idea why. I cannot put into words why I find the Miriam calls so damned funny. Maybe it’s repressed anger at an aunt who no longer speaks to us or maybe, just maybe, because it was fucking hilarious. Yes. I think it’s the second one. And letting Secretariat’s ass-end get a pay raise for one last dance was brilliant–I have missed that goofy bit.

Now I’m going to admit to something highly controversial–I can’t stand Jay Leno. Well, I couldn’t stand Tonight Show Jay Leno, not from day one. His style never really clicked with me on the show and eh. I only ever watched it when someone I really liked was on his show. I’m sure stand-up Leno is quite a nice fellow and normal walk-a-day Leno is, too. My opinion, though, was colored years ago when I saw him take the reins of the Tonight show. I was still mad that Johnny was gone and he was nothing like Carson–to me. That doesn’t mean I’m one of those people who gasped and said ‘My god, he’s having Leno as his last guest?!’ No. Quite the contrary. It just means I’m an old cow who needs to get out more. End of. Also, a side note: I don’t know much about stand-up Leno, either, because good god the whole denim thing? Irked me to shit. Means nothing except he’s probably a great stand-up and I hate all-denim. Also that I get annoyed at the most ridiculous things. I’m a spinster with too much time on my hands. Fuck off. I mean that lovingly, though.

-Bob the Dreamlord?

The ending was nothing like what I expected but watching it, holy fuck it made absolute perfect sense to me as it unfolded. It was so clever and so funny which is why I wasn’t all that broken up when it ended. I was too busy laughing, as I always do (even if I had shed a tiny tear or two, I’d never admit it, we NY chicks don’t roll that way!). The shout out to the Doctor with the TARDIS. I’d seen the reruns of the original Bob Newhart show and Newhart in the 80s. My brothers and I watched The Drew Carey Show religiously. I remember watching the St. Elsewhere finale with my mother when I was a teen. The only reference I didn’t catch was The Sopranos. Having never had cable during their run my extent of Sopranos knowledge was my brother’s ex telling me about a scene where Big Pussy was bitching about Tupperware. I don’t need to watch The Sopranos, anyway. I live in NYC. I know a guy who knows a guy. Youse know what I mean?

Now allow me to pop into my own TARDIS and go back to the opening. I was gobsmacked. Not just because of how great it was–seeing everyone from Josh with his maracas, to Kristin Bell to Tim Meadows to Metallica to Tutu–and everyone in between–banging their drums with Craig intertwined throughout. I wanted to know who wrote that damned song (Bang Your Drum by Dead Man Fall) because, as Kat will attest once she stops texting me as I write this and listens to the song, it was as if it had been ripped right out of my psyche. I’ve been bitching to Kat for ages now about having shit stuck inside my head and not being able to get it out. Same with my epileptishrink. All you have to do is swap waking at four AM with staying up til four AM and it’s me all over. Cliche and hack, admittedly, everyone says that about songs–but that one hit the nail on my epileptical head.

(Oh. Newsflash. I’ve been going to an epileptishrink for a few months. I’ve got a strong disdain for shrinks in general–another long story for another day–but a dumbass of a neuropsychiatrist thought it a good idea to deal with the ‘stress’ in my life which is one of my many triggers for seizures. Poppycock, I say. Fucking idiots doctors are half the stress in my life. I’m not an moron, though, so I’m willing to give anything a go. Epileptishrink tells me ‘You can’t do anything about this that and the other, it’s beyond your control. You should write. You always talk about writing and how you used to, so write’ I haven’t been able to. Obviously. This post clearly demonstrates that fact)

Anyway, that gobsmackery aside, it was just so great to see him atop his desk rocking out not giving a shit and enjoying himself. And I must say when the choir was revealed from behind the curtain I just thought ‘You clever bastards’ as I thought back to Betty’s hippo choir after banter.

-Kid ‘n Peaky Blinders.

I was, of course, sad to see him leave the show–but the show itself didn’t leave me sad, if that makes sense. Like he said, he’ll still do it to us. He may do it earlier. He may do it in a different place–but he’ll still do it. He’s got to bang his own drum and he’s the master of it and will continue to be for a good long while I reckon. He’s not retiring, for gods sake.

My only hope that I one day figure out which drum in my head I’m supposed to bang on, because I haven’t got a fucking clue. There’s about fifty of the damned things and I’ve got a motherfucker of a headache and I haven’t finished a fucking thing–like this post that was supposed to be about the last show. Not me.

When I was growing up, Twin Peaks was usually only mentioned at the tail end of some jackass yammering a joke about someone’s boobs. I never watched it when it aired because I was a mere twelve years old and probably too focused on Nicktoons to care. Lately there’s been a massive uptick of Twin Peaks attention on the interwebs since the announcement that it would be returning to television in a limited run for Showtime. Having binged the entire series and subsequent film and extended/deleted scenes, I can say with certainty that the first season was a boundary-pushing stylistic masterpiece that spiraled rapidly into the toilet as the show undermined its female characters within the second season.

I shouldn’t have to say this for a two-decade old show, but there’s spoilers inside. If you’re still watching, don’t read this yet.

For starters, it seemed to me that for a show with a handsome besuited paragon for a male lead, the show had a lot of really compelling female characters who were just as important. Donna Hayward, for example, was bright and righteous but cursed; every investigation she attempted ended in someone getting harmed or killed, and her percieved innocence to Laura was central to their relationship and the events that occurred. Audrey Horne was an inquisitive firestarter driven by her need for male validation, who cleverly tricked her way into uncovering her father’s misdeeds while getting in over her head, and it was critical to his downfall. Josie, Catherine, Norma, Blackie, and especially Shelley, were all relatively strong female characters with strengths, flaws, and fears. They all had value to add to the story but were all limited by various factors, mostly caused by men.

In a way, it helped build this idea of Twin Peaks being a place where even the strongest women are routinely trapped, minimized, objectified, disempowered. It was a reflection of society, and for a while it didn’t really flaunt it as much as it illustrated the brutality of macho posturning and sexual abuse. Laura Palmer’s backstory was rife with a history of male abuses, starting with repeated rape from BOB via Leland throughout her entire life, and ending with dangerous disregard for her body with many sexual partners and johns, and a compulsive need to snort coke and engage in risky behaviors. That’s not unlike many young women dealing with sexual trauma while trapped within patriarchal systems.

That isn’t to say that her story is being presented without a certain air of salaciousness, to draw the wry smiles of aged 18-49 men in the nineties who could get a halfie from a story about a girl who liked having sex with ugly abusive men. A lot of the violence was strangely juxtaposed with the innocence of teen sexuality, love, and waywardness. There was also that touch of predatory behavior towards the young women in many of the men, which is why it was so important to Cooper’s characterization that he rejected Audrey Horne’s advances for so long. His morality needed to remain intact while peeling the onion layers off of the town.

(Not that an especially moral man would lust for a teen, but within the moral spectrum of the show, he remains on the high end. It was the 90s, and a lot of creepy shit was still acceptable back then.)

Yeah, I would. You would too.

All the while, the campiness of the show suggests the real antagonist is the toxic masculinity and entitlement of male abuse. Or at least, that’s how it seems under that lens, because masculinity is already so comically ridiculous when viewed from a safe distance. Certainly Ben and Jerry Horne are easy examples, as is Leo. Dr. Jacoby, under the guise of helping Laura Palmer, turns out to be another creep that gets his jollies off of her story. But even Dale Cooper suggests that women are “illogical” and that men should not bother trying to figure us out, which is interesting considering his great prowess as an intuitive investigator who finds real life meaning in his fucking dreams. [Edit: The actual quote here was “There’s no logic at work here, Andy, let that one go. In the grand design, women were drawn from a different set of blueprints.”] Some detective. He didn’t bother asking Lucy Moran why she was upset until much later. DUH, she was pregnant and didn’t want to be with either potential father. That’s not so tough to figure out, now is it?

I’d rather view this as the unevolved mindset of a community buried under the eaves of patriarchy than Lynch and Frost’s original vision, mind you; while I am certain that some of this is a creator’s fantasy of dominant men and submissive women, it was/is also the unquestionable reality woven invisibly into women’s lives. The reason that’s important is because if the entire show were one male fantasy, the later part of season two would just be a show going from bad to worse. But in understanding the setting as a hierarchy demonstrating the subversion of female empowerment, it becomes easier to see the extremely rapid decline of a really fantastic show as soon as Leland dies. I mean really bad, sinking into the aesthenosphere bad.

There was a sudden shift in the show’s mood shortly after Leland died. Benjamin Horne had a wild period of civil-war obsessed insanity and then shifted rapidly to superdad and tree-hugger. While his character’s interaction with Catherine suggested it might have been a ruse to handily grab available land and capital, his relationship with Audrey showed some kind of “father knows best” rebirth, with a mere moment of apology between the two. And despite Audrey’s deeply unsettling experiences, she falls in line as daughter of the year in the hopes of actually inheriting the family business. Mind you, in the show’s timeline, it was less than a month ago that she was fending off his sexual advances at One-Eyed Jack’s and nearly overdosing on his heroin. His return to clarity is celebrated as some exciting hard-won moment. It doesn’t make any sense. There should be bad blood or at least suspicion there.

Nevermind that by the end of the series, the show practically forgot that Audrey, Bobby, James, Donna, Shelly, and Mike are all high school students or high school age. By the end of the second season, the month is March (Laura Palmer was killed in February). Maybe it’s just me as a teacher, but I can’t suspend my disbelief enough to imagine Audrey Horne planning a business trip to Seattle during the only month of the school year where there are no observed holidays.

Even worse, despite Leo being physically and mentally abusive towards Shelly and trying to kill her twice (once with brain damage, once premeditated without), with all of this on top of his being a philanderer and a convict, he somehow earned a redeeming moment by releasing Briggs and asking him to save Shelly. This was a preposterous shark-jumping moment that had my eyebrows knotted. There was simply nothing about it that made sense. Leo had been an abuser through and through, even while scrubbing the floors during Fire Walk With Me. His redemption was a repugnant decision. It made him a martyr.

There were lots of other characters and stories that appeared to serve no real purpose. Evelyn’s entire relationship with James, the entire existence of Lana (and her role as the sexual dynamo[object] that could make all men weak), and the entire concept behind Miss Twin Peaks all seemed like plot contrivances that were specifically designed to show as much lacy leg as possible and were inconsequential to telling a story about Cooper and Earle. Miss Twin Peaks could have just as easily been a high school dance, a town-wide wedding, or unlimited pasta night at Olive Garden, but none of those made it as easy to put a bunch of attractive women in black pantyhose with the lines going up the back of the leg.

I consider this the nadir of the series

I also still don’t understand the larger purpose behind Donna’s parentage, when her character would be so much more effectively used as another junior detective getting into other trouble related to the mysteries at hand. The girl unearthed evidence that was hidden from a supernatural rape demon inside of Laura’s mind, who cares who her father is?

Once Laura Palmer’s murder was solved, the show devolved into a series of nonsensical unconnected mini plots that devalued compelling female characters. By the end, they didn’t matter much as independent young women, because they were framed as either ornaments, lovers, or targets.

That isn’t to say the show’s failures weren’t caused by outside forces. It’s well known that the network pushed Lynch and Frost to reveal Laura’s murderer well before they had intended, denying them the opportunity to continue intricately weaving threads into the mystery and forcing them to haphazardly come up with a new story. The intervention of suits is often the cause of bad television. And it has been said that that Cooper and Audrey Horne’s love interests were only introduced into the cast because Lara Flynn Boyle vetoed their pairing together, despite their relationship being well developed. The result of that was two haphazard pairings, one completely forgettable, and one that was effectively used but devoid of the age taboo that made Dale/Audrey so interesting to watch.

But could you imagine what a memorable moment it would have been had Audrey asked Cooper to be her first, and how that scene could have played out with the mingling notes of mischief, innocence, and creeping evil? And if Audrey were Windam Earle’s target, then?

I could go on for paragraphs and paragraphs about the lost opportunities from twenty years ago, but it doesn’t add to anything. The point I am making is this: though several nostalgic fans and critics have pointed out that the meandering and drawn out plots and lack of cohesive vision caused the demise of Twin Peaks, I posit that the most critical failure was the show undermining its female characters on a show that had initially made good and purposeful use of their characterization.

It brings me back to one of the best moments of season 2, when Miguel Ferrer (I fucking love Miguel Ferrer) suggests this:

“Maybe that’s all BOB is, the evil that men do. Maybe it doesn’t matter what we call it.”

General George Hammond from Stargate and Miguel Ferrer

Indeed, Twin Peaks was at its best a show that put a spotlight on the evils of men and the ingenuity of the women stuck dealing with them. I hope this quote bounces around the writer’s room before any stories get put on paper, or this Showtime reboot will be a bust.

You want me to laugh at Seth Rogen pointing out a Korean character just said “dong?”

I didn’t digitally purchase The Interview expecting a masterpiece of comedy. I guess I was just hoping for something slightly more interesting to watch because it dealt with such sensitive subject matter and had the capacity to take it really ridiculously far. What I got was another bro movie about bros doing bro things. Insert a few wild party montages with scantily clad babes, a couple of one-sided female characters for the men to ogle, and butt stuff, and you’ve got yourself a bonafide stinker of a film.

Why expect more? The movie never intended to be anything more than it is, which is dudebro comedy for very young dumb men. It’s the kind of movie that needs to remind us that it’s funny by spelling out its own comedy (for example, reminding the viewer that we’re watching Katy Perry being played inside of a North Korean tank under attack, even though we can see the tank, and hear the Katy Perry). It’s also the kind of movie that uses poop and butt jokes but doesn’t actually write punchlines for them, instead hoping that saying “poop” and “butt” do the job for everyone. It’s the kind of movie that doesn’t necessarily want to be called sexist, so they’ll write in Franco calling out sexism a couple of times, only his calling out sexism becomes the punchline.

It’s the kind of movie written by people who know that the thirtysomethings are into 80s references these days, so they say that something looks like Falcor from The Neverending Story and they’ll know they’ll have us. And that might have been super effective a few years ago, but now it’s just noticeably trite. And the jokes about margaritas and pop stars and homosexuality are eyeroll-worthy.

Did I hate all of it? No. I chuckled at Seth Rogen in pain, at inserting things into his butt cavity. I’m keeping “Peanut Butter and Jealous” because it’s clever and stupid enough for me to use on a regular basis. I thought the idea that they’d invent a crunchy grocery store and a fanbase for Franco’s character was interesting and entirely plausible.

The plot wasn’t entirely awful. It actually could have been a way funnier heist-type movie. It was too easy for them to walk around the compound without being watched or followed, and too easy for them to escape. Things started to seem implausible, like the fact that Rogen wasn’t immediately deported after being found in the field with a dead tiger, or that the guard put an unidentified stick in his mouth (I think a North Korean guard would have made Franco eat it, which would have required a whole rewrite). There were just a lot of little things that made the stakes seem lower. So while the plot as an idea was alright, the execution was a weak.

The final interview absolutely did not disappoint. It wasn’t Frost/Nixon, but at least it had seen the movie and knew why it was important. Franco started the actual interview making me wish Jeff Daniels was on the sidelines waiting for his turn, and then twisted it into a biting criticism of Kim Jong Un’s policies. What resumes is the intellectual equivalent of a Facebook argument where people are scanning Wikipedia for facts to throw at each other whether they make a point or not, something which I can totally allow in this scene because it is literally the most intellectual part of the film, the only thing my poor drunk brain could reach down and grab and say “you made it guys, you sort of said something maybe valuable here. Maybe.”

I thought Kim Jong Un was actually pretty interesting. Actually, he was the most interesting character in the film, because he’s the one who actually had depth, and his “honeydicking” had me questioning his motives several times throughout the film. He’s actually the only character worth remembering. That said, he could have had any number of hilarious and inappropriate character flaws that this film could invent and exploit, but the film chose to capitalize on his invisible asshole and deific non-need to excrete. It was a lost opportunity to explore things that could have been absolutely insane and would have guaranteed the real Kim Jong Un wanting to hit that button. Why? So they could have another party champagne scene with a few topless Korean chicks and another opportunity for Franco to milk his gay fanbase.

It just makes me think that if this film hit theaters with the standard hype machine, it would have done low to moderately well, but been ultimately forgotten. And that makes me think that either the Sony hack and subsequent intervention is a financial blessing in disguise, or that someone called in a lot of favors to have this dog wagged extra hard in light of all of the other newsworthy stories that should be dominating the headlines.The only way they could get a whole lot of people to pay money and feel good about seeing this movie is by convincing them that they almost lost the right to watch it, because the easiest way to get Americans to do something is by convincing them it is their patriotic duty to do so.

Introspective photography is defined by how much of the lens you accidentally cover with your palm

The feeling I get once I build a connection is strangely invigorating. Coming out of a state of perpetual awkwardness into a sense of connection is like being birthed; it is uncomfortable and sometimes traumatic, but it ends with being wrapped in a blanket of warmth and acceptance. It was well worth it.

Social interaction requires some amount of risk. I’m accustomed to navigating social scenarios with more socially bonded friends, people who have more skills than me. I’m unashamed to say that I am a follower, not a leader; this doesn’t mean I’m going to follow my friends off a bridge into a heroin forest like everyone’s parents suggested when we were kids, but it does mean that I’m usually better suited to lurking in the shadows of a conversation and a connection than jumping out right in front of it. I’m an introvert until I’m comfortable, and then I’ll dance with you until the sun comes up. Even doing that took years of learning to become comfortable with myself, so it means something.

CommuniCon forced me to risk making connections on my own, something that feels like using a weak muscle. I’ve been forced to exercise that muscle since Theresa E left New York. The Jay to my Silent Bob was no longer there to pull all of the weight. Naturally the last year without her involved foibles, odd stares, over-read sentences and cut-short conversations. Anxiety feels a little bit like a fist in the lower colon that never quite leaves the gut. It is extraordinarily uncomfortable while also being the most singularly manageable pain I’ve ever experienced; somehow, despite awkward interactions feeling like a never-ending psychological diarrhea cramp, aborting the conversation would be that much worse and would leave some kind of residual damage, some kind of social faux pas that would result in a later conversation. “Oh that Kat,” they’d say, shaking their head. “How rude.” And it would be totally fair, except if they could see inside my brain and understand that there was no malice in any of it. I’m just uncomfortable.

Everything I do feels like I’m putting someone out. I feel apologetic about engaging in conversation, as if I’m taking up someone’s time, but so wanting of connection that I’ll try anyway. And I’ll reflexively try to blather the inane small talk that people seem to connect with, but I admit the subjects are so boring to me that I emulate it terribly. “I like bagels. I once had the best bagel ever, and I had it because my brother had one. It had sesame seeds. Yeah dude, it was awesome.” Nobody, literally nobody, cares even the slightest about any of those statements, and I don’t either, but I feel compelled to say them because I feel like I am supposed to engage. It’s never surprising when someone turns away or starts talking to someone else, I just wish I were cool enough to also do that and not feel shitty about it.

It’s much easier when people are able to gauge my intelligence and see that the things I am passionate about and what resonates with me, because I know I am a good conversationalist when the topics get higher and require some kind of intellectual pursuit instead of shallow judgment.

This is important background to talk about CommuniCon, because the sorts of people I have trouble with aren’t present here. An apt term might be “normies” or, if I were to broaden the term used by Matt Lucas during Inspecticon, “neurotypicals.” One of my roommates described them as the “chain restaurants” of people; I might describe them as “fans of Chuck Lorre.” These people are the ones who can have a ten minute conversation about the benefits of mild weather with no real purpose other than to break the silence. They’re the kinds of people who go on vacation to tropical countries or highly cultured locales and never leave the comforts of the hotels. They are intimidated by people with depth because they don’t have any, and they tend to think people like me are stuck up or snobbish because I cannot connect with the things they love. I don’t mean to shame them. Normals are fine people. After all, I still attempt to connect with them and fail, right?

None of these people were here this weekend.

I got on twitter late in the game, you know. By the time I was hip to the social media community behind Community, factions had formed, friends were made, and people had established patterns of communication that I felt compelled to be part of but remained awkwardly wary of. I built my own connections with plenty of great people, but nothing particularly depthful. It’s to be expected, nobody really knew me. And I don’t have the time I used to have, so I can’t type my twats to Twitter all day like many of these people are able to do. I’ve always watched from a distance, observing the connections and seeing who was friends and who wasn’t. I watched and learned. That transferred here. I talked with a bunch of people I only ever knew as @ signs before, people who I knew well enough but didn’t know me, not because of lack of interest, but because of fear of engagement. I have always felt that every tweet was a risk of embarrassing myself, not unlike every interaction, every conversation. And many times I have embarrassed myself, by drinking my wine and reveling in its unbelievably effective means of dulling all of the everything else that’s been slowly driving me to madness. The memories make me even more quiet.

But good heavens, hells, and inbetweens, weren’t you misfits the most welcoming bunch of awkward fucks I’ve ever had the honor of nerding out with.

I saw my patterns in some of you. The absent smiles, the feelings of depression or anxiety, the revelations in drinks, and more than anything, the understanding that anyone could talk to anyone by starting a conversation with “who is your favorite?” Walls came down. Though I met day one with timidness and found myself needing a few vodka oranges to get comfortable, by the end of day two, everyone was a potential new friend. We were all misfits. We were a room full of weirdos and we all knew it, so a lot of the fear dissipated.
I don’t approach people with comfort because I anticipate rejection, which is my biggest fear. Rejection hurts because the person you want to make company with doesn’t reciprocate, but it hurts even more because the rejection itself is potentially a source of embarrassment. We all remember high school, and many of us had hard experiences there; being rejected by one of the popular kids was bad enough, but the rest of their entourage reviled us and giggled behind hands at our ostracization. And that follows us forever, I think. I don’t think it leaves any of us behind, even though we now know that they hated us because we were too smart for them to connect with, and too insecure to say so.

It doesn’t mean that we don’t experience some degree of cliquey behavior. CommuniCon had a hierarchy. I somewhat observed it by equating ribbons with MeowMeowBeenz, but it was much more present in the level of openness among certain established groups. Some people find their study group and move on, while others always have room for a little spare Chang. Similarlt, some Communies greeted me with hugs, others ignored me flat out when I attempted to hold the elevator for them. It’s interesting to see a subset of a subset of a subset of American society and watch them emulate larger patterns. Opinions about certain aspects of Dan Harmon’s abrasiveness seemed to morph the crowd into political parties, creating a right and a left. Cliques formed based on similar interests and communication patterns, and even energy level. There were times where I felt like some kind of interloper, trying to be a social butterfly among established cells, others where I felt like I had landed and belonged. The view from here made me realize that I am outsider among insiders, while feeling like an insider with all the other outsiders, if that makes any sense. It was a party for square pegs to be free from the round holes for awhile. I still feel a bit trapezoid, but I think everyone does. We gravitate towards Community because it is made for people who are askew.

I think where I come from is that I’m late to the game in terms of feeling satisfied and comfortable with myself… most of the borderline aspies and social anxious types here have known for years where they stand, while I’ve been comfortably avoiding my own truths. It is only in the last few months that I chose to come face to face with my shit, and acknowledge the long ignored backlog of emotions that need to be felt, assessed, and filed into my consciousness. I am not an aspie, not by any stretch, but I am smart enough to know where I stand.

I think I’m happy to be among these people.

Notable notes and thoughts from last weekend:

I truly and deeply appreciate the brave souls that put quarters in my butt. We collected over $34 for the Doug Flutie Jr. Foundation for Autism, and some lucky family will be able to afford briefcase tacos because of us.

It is really nice to be among big drinkers.

I am willing to buy any button or sticker. I seriously spent a lot of money on buttons and stickers.

I absolutely must find a way to connect with people while skipping the unnecessary small talk, because there are others like me who do not need it or want it, and my compulsions are rooted in expectations, not reality.

I had a conversation with a real genius (not including Dan Harmon) and I believe meeting him has affected me profoundly.

I really don’t care how much drinks cost at the hotel bar if I’m within five hours of a flight.

There’s a reason why I don’t buy bacon at home, and it’s because I know exactly how much of it I will eat, and I am certain I will die.

Yahoo Screen is either really naïve or really anticipating a huge profit from season 6. Either way, I think they’re just plain awesome.

Brisco Diggs (Black Hitler) signed my butt, and then half of the “No Small Parts” panel ended up doing the same. My butthole is his now.

I get/am doomed to have to tell people that Dan Harmon put money in my butt crack.

Thanks for the photo, @violincatherine.Also, Dan described this as his autism face as he donated his money